just looking at the pics of the beast Tom, i like how you have painted the chrome side window trim, im also going to do that, give it that group a look.
Is yours body colour or black?
any more pics of her?how does it feel to be driving her now?

All the chrome has been painted, not much of chrome fan! Everything is colour coded to the same colour as the body. I reckon it's a nice mod, one that you don't necessarily notice to begin with.
Haven't taken any more photos yet, been flat out with work, and trying to finish all the little jobs I have left to do. Took a day off last week to do a bunch of fiddly bits. Finally fitted some bonnet struts - stoked with them. Just found a hole in the fuel tank tho, so a bit annoyed about that - not lookin forward to dropping that again!
It feels amazing to have a car after a year of being car-less! Loving driving it around. Fuel economy is sh1thouse as I just can't drive it off boost!
Nice to see the progress on your car - I had no idea you were going so hard. Good to see!

oh yea kol, yea it is a mod you dont notice, i was just taking another look at your pics and saw it, very kol.
Yea bet it feels good to drive, fuel economy doesnt matter when ya boostn around, VLs were never that great on gas anyway.Ass about the gas tank. not a nice job eh.

Yip going nuts on my girl, just cant help myself.be few sutle mods and bits thatg will be different to any others around, dont think anyone in NZ has gone as far as i have with engine bay body mods etc.
ill try not to make it a 9 year build like the HZ ute, missus would nut me if i ddi that anyway.

Know im dragging old thread up here....but still waiting on those pictures of your beast in the sun etc Tom.
Also are you going to be behind the wheel at power cruise this year? Be good to see you out there!

I've always loved cars, but after owning a couple of boring sh1t boxes I decided it was time for something with a bit more grunt. Commodores have long appealed to me so I started looking for something in my price range. It was around this time that I stumbled upon this website, and that's when the trouble started... It was actually the cruelly named "Plastic Pig" - a.k.a. the Walkinshaw, that really got me hooked. Having moved to NZ from the UK I had never seen anything like the Walky before; I love the in-your-face styling so I decided that a Walkinshaw replica was my goal.
After a lot of searching and saving for a VL, I finally found one. The car was a relatively tidy RB30 manual owned by a Westie sheila who worked in a wrecking yard (no sh1t!). I went to see the car, and she took me for a drive, including high-speed motorway blast. Only after asking several times for a test drive did she let me behind the wheel. A week later it was mine.
My car is (was!) a VL GTS something the previous owner had convinced me that was special. Many hours of interweb searches followed to see whether I should mess with this 'rare' model. The searches turned up very little. From what I could tell it was a limited edition model built to try and move old stock (the release of the VN wouldn't have been far away at this time). Fairly common in NZ, I can hear the Aussies asking what the fcuk is a GTS? This is what I know; They were a limited run of 300 units. All the cars were single tone, red or white. They had a few exclusive parts such as a unique interior trim, Momo steering wheel, trick alloys, GTS badging (looks like a left over Monaro badge and it's date stamped 1978!),letter box grill, front lip spoiler and a rear bobtail. An 80s cool 'Commodore' taillight filler panel (also used on VK GTS's) rounded out the modifications. Rumours suggested motor and suspension tweaks, but both are false.
At this point, the car was pretty much stock save for the 16 inch OZ wheels and lowered springs. With the idea of a Walkinshaw firmly implanted in my mind, I started researching all I could about the body kit. Being young and naive, I thought the 114kW output of the RB30 was ripper, so the plan was to buy and fit a Walky kit, then repaint the car in Panorama Silver. However my plans ground to a halt when I saw the price of the body kit; $4000! - it was almost as much as I had paid for the car! I decided to rethink my plans.
At this point, I should explain that I had recently started a new job - a dream job you might say. I am an automotive photographer for a leading NZ car magazine, so not only do I get to photograph all the brand new cars released to the market, I also get to drive them. Until starting this job, I had driven about ten different cars in total. So my actual driving experiences had been fairly limited, and it would be fair to say that I was more interested in show than go. This job changed everything. Spoiled by driving new cars with four or five times the power of my Commodore I started to realise that a Walkinshaw replica with a stock RB30 simply wasn't gonna cut it. My savings went into overdrive as I realised that I not only wanted a quicker car, but also one that could handle. Using this site as my starting point, I started to look into engine and styling options. I decided that a six cylinder Walky would be blasphemous, so a V8 transplant would be in order. After drawing up a budget I realised there was no way I could extract what I considered to be reasonable power out of a V8 for the money I had to spend. I looked at adding a turbo to the existing RB30, but came to the same conclusion. I should point out that the NZ section on Calais Turbo was pretty quiet and only had a few members at this stage. There was bugger all info about boosting the RB30 in NZ, and my mechanic just asked how deep my pockets were! However, the RB25DET conversion had cropped up in my searches, and the more I read about it, the more I realised that this was the engine for me. With 205kW from the factory, and plenty of aftermarket parts available, the RB25DET conversion was a no brainer.
One of the biggest motivators for this project was that up until this point, my only mechanical experience was an oil change. This lack of knowledge frustrated me, and I realised that the only way to fix this was to throw myself in the deep end and attempt a ground up rebuild on the VL.

The GTS shortly after purchase

Interior trim was unique to the GTS. Speaker pods in front doors were one of the first mods I did. Pods were constructed from MDF and fibreglass

Moulded parcel shelf was also built by myself, and is still in the vehicle today

Group A rear spoiler was fitted at the same time the rear window rust was fixed. Also pictured is the unique taillight filler panel

GTS badge

2006-2007 - Stripping her bare

With a budget drawn up, and a 'healthy' savings account I purchased new daily driver - a well loved Honda Accord complete with tow bar. It wasn't flash, but it just had to last the six months or so that the rebuild was going to take. That was December 2006...
The more I surfed the net and read magazines, the more ideas I had, and the more my project evolved. I hate doing half ar5ed jobs, so the VL was going to be no exception. Christmas holidays came around and I got to work, stripping everything I could off of the car. I decided to go for a bare metal respray, so preparation for sand blasting began. A mate turned up with an engine lifter and we pulled out the old donk and pushed it into the corner of the garage, where it remained for the next few years - much to the annoyance of my mother.

The stripping begins

The old dirty thirty

Removing the RB30

Test fitting a dent free front guard

A rather empty looking engine bay

The long nights in the garage were one of the most enjoyable parts of the build. I would tinkering away into the small hours of the morning twirling spanners and sucking back beers. Everything I removed was bagged, tagged and stacked neatly into boxes. I have the unfortunate knack of being able to pull things apart and not being able to get them back together again, so I was determined the VL wouldn't suffer this fate! The last part of the stripping process was also the hardest; removing the doors. I'd read all the forum threads, followed all the instructions, bought the tool, but the b4stards wouldn't budge. It took a hell of a lot of hammering and swearing to remove them, and I absolutely destroyed the tool in the process, but after a few nights work, I finally had all four doors on the floor.

Interior out, new parts waiting to be fitted line the shed walls

Dirty drum brake diff awaiting removal

Reconditioned disk brake diff waiting to be fitted

Rear wheel well prior to painting

Fresh coat of underseal applied

Empty inside

I would have been much better off financially if I hadn't consumed so many of these on the job!

With the windscreens out, the full extent of the trademark windscreen rust was visible. The metalwork looked like swiss cheese in places - I actually wondered if it was repairable. Still, I carried on regardless, and soon sent the car to the sand blasters.
I picked up the freshly blasted shell a week later, and found that a few hidden scrapes and rust patches had revealed themselves. The biggest disappointment however was the rear windscreen rust repair that I had paid a 'professional' to fix about a year earlier.The repair was as rough as guts and honestly looked like Stevie Wonder had done it . Needless to say, these 'professionals' got no more work out of me. The sand blasting was definitely worthwhile, but the sand gets everywhere! I regret not removing the entire HVAC system from the car as I'm still finding sand blows out of it after almost two years on the road!

Rust

Ready for sand blasting

The trusty Accord loaded up for the VLs first road trip in nine months

Back from blasting. This pic shows the 'professional' rust repair

A few surprises lurked under the paint

With the car coated in primer and back in my parents shed I began fitting some more of the new parts I had acquired. All the bushes were replaced with brand new Nolathane items, while the old shocks and springs got turfed in favour of new, lower items. Bigger sway bars were fitted front and rear and an adjustable panhard rod was also added.
The next big job was to make the Recaro seats fit. Being a "Series 1" model, the seats and runners are one unit, which means an angle grinder is required to separate the runners from the seat base. I needed to use the factory runners to get certification, and to make the job of fitting the bucket seats a little easier. Mocking up the brackets was another one of the sh1t jobs I encountered on the project. I'm no fabricator, and I can't even weld, so I used the next best thing to metal - wood! Using some old pine skirting board I had lying around, I mocked up my seat brackets. It was a long frustrating process to get the seats to fit, and I spent many hours scratching my head and cursing trying to make it work. Eventually the job was done, and a mate managed to translate my wood templates into metal brackets.

Mocking up the seat brackets

One seat in

Two seats in! The long, frustrating hours required to manufacture brackets not pictured!

After trial fitting a few other bits and pieces, I then had to make sure the new engine actually fitted! Fitting the engine was surprisingly easy - mixing and matching the 25/30 engine mounts was all it took to slot it in.

Checking that the engine fits!

Fitting the intercooler and fabricating all the associated plumbing was the next big job - thankfully having two mates who are stainless steel engineers helps, and between them we managed to get the bulk of the job completed over a couple of weekends.
By this stage I had decided that I wanted more of a 'sleeper' look, so a lot of work went into making the intercooler as invisible as possible. It sounds strange, but I used a large intercooler in order to make it less visible! A generous coating of matt black paint over the shiny finish also helped. In order to keep the installation stealthy I had to lose the air conditioning - no biggie as it didn't work, and besides the car has four functioning windows!

Installing intercooler

Intercooler plumbing completed

Stealthy installation achieved (well, once black paint has been applied!)

As everyone knows, wheels can make or break your car, so I spent hours researching designs and 'fitting' wheels to my car in photoshop. I shortlisted a few designs, including some of the HSV variety. Originally I had planned on running 18inch jobbies, but after seeing a few VLs on 18s, I decided that 19s were what was needed to achieve the look I wanted. With the wheel designs in mind, I searched Trade Me as I did every day, and happened upon a set of VZ HSV wheels and tyres for sale. All the wheels were kerbed, but they came with legal tyres, and were going cheap. I went to view the wheels, and bought them on the spot.
Making the wheels fit properly wasn't so easy. The rear wheels and tyres fitted *just* but the fronts wouldn't rotate at all. It turned out that the VZ spec tyres were fouling on the lower spring seats; suddenly my 'cheap' wheels and tyres were no longer looking so cheap. Still, I had the wheels I wanted, having to buy new tyres just meant the car would spend a few more months parked up in the garage. In the meantime, I sent the wheels to a wheel repair shop to make them look new again.

Flash GTS alloys

VZ HSV wheels fitted

The next big ticket job was the panel beating, so I sent the car to a mate-of-a-mates workshop. The guy did panel work in his spare time, in between running a wrecking business. A panel beater originally by trade - he did good work, albeit slowly. Of course he groaned when I told him the car was going to be black, but he got on with the work and did a top job. On top of the repairs and straightening, the passenger door lock and aerial were shaved, and a few other joins tidied up. Only a small amount of work went into the bay - a few holes filled and the battery tray removed - I wasn't building a show car - I simply wanted a nice daily. All was going smoothly until it came to the roof - there were a few dents - what looked like fist marks, and of course that dodgy rust repair. The panel beater was so disgusted with the state of the roof that we actually considered a re-skin. After a bit of hunting, we decided that this simply wasn't viable. After many curse-filled hours the roof was returned to its original glory. The only other issue we struck at this stage was replacing the rusty spare wheel well. I ordered a none-too-cheap repair panel from a respected supplier and handed it to my panel beater. He took one look at it and tossed it onto the floor in disgust. "Get a refund" was all he said before he made a nice new wheel well on the spot for nix.

Panel beating completed - trial fitting of more parts. Achieving a bolt-less and screw-less finish for the Group A bib was a lot of work, but well worth it.

With the panels all nice and straight, the car went back to my parents shed again to fit more parts. It sat here for a few months while I scraped together more money so that I could get the paint underway. Choosing the colour was the hardest part of the project. To begin with I thought about respraying the car in the same factory red, but I soon decided that it would make the car look too much like a Group A replica, which I didn't want. There were a few colours I liked, Candy Apple red was high on the list, but soon fell out of favour simply from the point of view of cost. I then looked at factory paint colours, starting with the HSV range. Phantom Black was high on the list as was a really dark green colour (the name escapes me), but still nothing really jumped out at me until I came across Cherry Black. A combination of red and black, it sounded perfect. Being a mica paint I knew the colour would change depending on the light - at first look the car would appear black, but a second glance would reveal it was a bit special - just like the rest of the car. Having never seen a car painted in Cherry Black I had no idea how the paint would look. I got a spray can of the colour mixed up and applied it to half of a front guard I had lying around. I thought about the colour for weeks, checking out the way the paint looked in different lights and conditions. Having owned a black car before, I knew how hard they were to keep clean, and looking tidy; the lazy side of me was saying no to black! However, one stunning summer evening I pulled the guard out into the light to see the effect of the sunset in the paint. The warm tones and deepness of the paint blew me away, I loved how the paint changed at every angle it was viewed from. It was this moment I knew my car had to be this colour. I dropped the car off at the paint shop a few weeks later, and didn't see it again until just days before Christmas. I hadn't even had the chance to check in on progress. When I finally spoke to the painter on the phone he told me it looked quite purple, this had me worried for a bit, but as soon as I saw the car in the sun, I knew everything was OK!

A couple of days after Christmas the car was back on axle stands and a good mate was helping me install the motor and box. It was a nerve wracking experience having to slot the motor into the freshly painted bay, but with a bit of care we got the thing in without a scratch. The gearbox was a little harder; the big 25DET box is a tight fit in the VL tunnel, and tightening the bell housing bolts required three extensions on the socket!

Ready for the motor install

Motor in

The painters did an awesome job - very little of the original paint remains visible anywhere

Loom and ancillaries installed

Matt black intercooler looks the goods

Spaghetti!

Skyline loom installed - what a mess!

Link ECU loom - sooo much simpler than the Nissan one. Hard to believe that this bundle of wires replaces all the factory stuff

The Accord is still going, and towing the VL on another trip

Tools of the trade!

Getting there!

Four months went by, with work being done at every opportunity I had, but still progress was slow. The number of jobs that needed completing were often overwhelming. Another mate-of-a-mate offered to wire up the Link computer, so April saw the car on another road trip to have the wiring done. It took a good few weeks to get this done, and it was on my way to pick up the car that I had one of the biggest scares of the whole project...
Towing the empty car trailer with my brother's VT wagon, the trailer started to fishtail wildly at about 90km/h.On the motorway. In the wet. It was more luck than skill saw me keep the thing straight on the road and bring the car and trailer to a safe stop. It turns out the guy who hitched the trailer up at the hire centre hadn't done so properly, which led to the hitch bouncing off of the tow ball. The trailer was left holding on to the car only by only the safety chain. Not ideal. Thankfully the vL was not on the back when this happened!
Once the wiring was completed the car went straight to the glazier to have the windscreens and rear quarter windows fitted. This trip produced my second scare of the weekend; As I started to winch the car back onto the trailer (the car still doesn't drive, and it's been 28 months since it has...) half way up the ramps, the winch rope snaps and the car starts rolling backwards towards a brick wall...Thankfully I got to the handbrake before the car got to the wall. Needless to say, I never used that trailer again.
Once again, the car went back to my folks garage and the big push was on to get the car finished and on the road. I started work on the interior, making speaker pods and modifying my existing parcel tray. Brand new carpet also found its way onto the floor. Despite the claims that the stuff is as good as factory, it aint. It is a lot of work to make it fit right, and I still not 100% happy with the end result. It is however, better than the stuff it replaced. I cleaned and painted all the dash and centre console pieces using black spray dye. With a bit of work, they do come up well. It's not as good as a factory job, but for the money, it looks pretty good.

Windscreens fitted and en-route back to the folks garage

2009-2010 Going nowhere fast!

I was determined to finish the car by Christmas (09) (that was the plan last Christmas too..), but of course, things like work and a missus get in the way of things. Losing my licence for three months didn't help much either. Getting a temporary licence sucked up a bunch of my savings, and to top it off, my daily driver died, so I was left broke and car-less. The fact that the VL was based a good 160kms from where I live made going to work on it that little bit harder. Needless to say, the car spent a few months gathering dust. June saw my licence restored so I took the car in for its first tune. The guys were really happy with the power they got out of the car, and at the same time, I got them to check over all my work to make sure the car was safe. They found very little wrong so I left happy, but broke again.

Exterior of car largely completed. Freshly painted wheels installed for the first time

In October, after some more saving, I booked the car in for certification (official stamp of approval of mods) confident it would fly through, naturally I was a little disappointed when it failed. The good news was that everything that needed fixing I could do my self. As feared though, the rear tyres were just too big, and as they occasionally rubbed on the arches, they had to go. Then came the another scare... The cert guy told me he hadn't been able to perform the road test due to the excessive smoke coming from the exhaust. Blown turbo he said. I almost cried! Down heartened, I towed the car home, thinking about the latest set back and how much it was going to cost me. I stopped off at my mechanics place on the way home and relayed my story. He thought it odd as the engine had gone through the tuning without a worry, and he had personally checked the engine over after I had purchased it. He popped the bonnet and eyed up my recently installed catch can. He told me to un-plumb it, take the car for a thrash and see if it stopped smoking. If it did, I owed him a box of beer... Sure enough it fixed the smoking. As it turned out, the filter-less catch can (and my incorrect installation of it) was pressurising the crank case and pushing oil past the rings, causing the excessive smoke. Thankfully it was a quick fix with no damage done. It was another month or so before I returned to the certifier, confident that this time that I would be road legal for Christmas 2010! I had finally driven the car a few times, and was actually disappointed in how quick it wasn't. Driving to the workshop, I was certain something didn't feel right, but I couldn't quite work out what. Upon returning to the certifiers workshop a few hours later, the guy told me my clutch was slipping. Yet again, my heart sank. All I could think of was another big bill. To pass certification and be legal all I needed was two new tyres, but being Christmas time, money was tight, and having to fork out for a new clutch meant there was no way the car was gonna be finished this year. Bugger.

Almost legal! However, a shagged clutch means the car stays in the shed for Christmas

Tailshaft loop - one of two fitted as per certifier instructions

2011 The final push!

Christmas came and went, the car was of course, back in my parents shed yet again while I saved my dollars. There were still heaps of small jobs to get done, some of which I have been putting off for ages. Fitting the upper and lower door moulds was a job I was not looking forward too. Naturally all the mouldings were missing the mounting pins, so it really was a case of guessing where they went. 3M tape, beer and Sikaflex in hand, I set aside an arvo and got it done. The exterior of the car was now complete.

Installing all the side mouldings

All the essentials; oil, rags, wax and grease remover and beer!

The makeshift rego label I used to drive to the certifiers - it almost looks legal from a distance!

May 2011

My folks were away on holiday, and I was in charge of picking them up on the airport, so I decided that their return date would also be the end date of my project. I decided a big push was needed to get things done, so I took a week off work and travelled to my parents place so I could make some progress. A few long days followed, tidying up all the little jobs that needed doing. With new tyres all round, and a new clutch, I finally got my cert plate attached to the vehicle. Almost legal! As I mentioned earlier, I was disappointed with the power of the car and decided to return it to the tuner to turn up the boost... A quick run on the dyno showed that I was in fact correct - the car was producing a lot less power than it had done on the first tune, and there was no explanation as to why. Various checks were made, and a few faults found, but nothing major that could explain the drop in power. Time was tight as the car was booked in for its final cut and polish the next day, but not only did the dyno guys find time to fix all the problems, they also managed to turn the boost up, and extract the power I wanted. Result; 217kW at the rear wheels. I left the tuners happy, but also with a short list of things that needed fixing. A new diff ratio is top of the list as the current 3.45 ratio is super tall - it makes the car sluggish at take off, so it still doesn't feel as quick as it should be. I hope the gears fix this. On the plus side, it'll do 250km/h in fourth gear...(dyno tested!)
Having used up nearly all my holiday at this point, I had to drop the car at the painters a few days later than planned, which meant another week would go by before I could pick the car up. My deadline was fast approaching!
I returned the following week to pick up my freshly polished car, and with less than a week before my folks returned, and I still had some jobs to complete. I drove the car the 140 or so kays back to Auckland without a single hiccup. Phew! One thing the tuners had picked up was the lack of beads on the intercooler pipes, this led to some of the pipes separating under boost. My first job back in Auckland was to remove the intercooler plumbing and deliver it to a local engineering shop to add beads to the pipes. It was Friday before I could pick them up; the night my folks arrived back in the country. It was a rush job after work to reinstall the plumbing, but I finally finished about half an hour before the plane touched down!

Road legal and ready for the first big drive

2013

I finally get around to doing a write up on my car! When I don't have a work car to cruise around in, the VL is my daily, and so far I've done over 15,000kms in the time that she's been on the road. Thankfully most of those kays have been trouble free. I've had a few electrical gremlins, including one that killed my expensive Optima battery. Another issue occurred on the way to Powercruise - 20kms from the race track, and after a 260km drive, the car decided to die. I traced the fault to the dodgy fuse rail - the fuel pump fuse had pretty much melted away! A five minute fix was all it took and I was on my way. Since then the fuse rail has had yet another meltdown, causing a few electrical issues. I have a 'Niche' fuse rail on order (hopefully this will turn up one day...), but in the mean time I have to make do with a handful of inline fuse holders.
So what's next? An LSD and some 4.11 gears are a must. The interior needs a few bits trimmed and replaced to make me happy. The boot needs a gas strut, the leak fixed and a sub and amp added. In the bay I'm pretty stoked with how everything turned out, although I wouldn't mind upgrading the brake booster and master cylinder at some point, but I'm not sure I can do this without taking the engine out, or at least lifting it off of a mount, so at this stage it's a low priority. I'm also pretty keen to bin the front shocks in favour of coilovers - there's too little clearance between the strut seat and tyre for my liking, and besides, I think the front needs to be a touch lower...
So would I do it again? In a heartbeat. Without a doubt, this has to be the most satisfying project I've undertaken. To do a ground-up rebuild with almost no mechanical knowledge, and to have the car actually work at the end was a great feeling. The mates I have made, the people I've met and the skills I have learnt made all the blood, sweat and the odd tear very worthwhile. There are things I would do differently in the future, but the project was a huge learning curve for me, and something I hope to be able to repeat one day.

wow Tom, its been said already, but crikey thats a hell of a build.
Keep that pretty quiet through out the build.
Sweet write up, epic build. good to see you are still enjoying it as a daily.
let me know what length gas strut you want for boot and ill sort it for you.